Less than thirty years ago, the term “telecommunications” connoted making and receiving telephone calls over the public switched telephone network (PSTN) built by AT&T. Today, telecommunications means transporting data representing voice, video, text, and instructions over wired and wireless digital networks such as the Internet.
Within the PSTN telephony environment the equipment needed to support the telecommunications infrastructure was centralized at a telephone company “central office” so that Customer Premises Equipment (CPE) could be limited to simple telephones. The nature of modern digital networks is to decentralize many functions and capabilities thus requiring more complex CPE to provide access. However, subscribers expect newer digital telecommunications to be usable with the same ease as the traditional telephone and at low cost. This expectation dictates that the digital network interfaces and associated protocols be compact and unobtrusive, implemented inexpensively, and require little in the way of subscriber interaction.
The complexity of implementing a CPE for digital telecommunications comes primarily from the need to implement the protocols used to organize information sent over digital networks. These protocols evolved in rich computing environments with many computing resources (e.g. CPU power for computation; memory for data and program storage). Additionally, the protocols evolved quickly (i.e. in months or years, vs. the traditional PSTN years or decades), reflecting knowledge gained from actual application. The CPE for digital communications of today must, therefore, have an effective way to deal with protocol implementation within the restricted computational resources dictated by the CPE's restricted hardware cost.
What would be useful is a system and method for implementing multiple digital telecommunication protocols on a reduced hardware CPE that is not limited to any specific protocol.